Lifeboat Foundation

Only 35 per cent of five- to 17-year-olds and 62 per cent of children ages 3 and 4 are getting the recommended physical-activity levels for their age group (Editor’s note: around 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, including vigorous-intensity activity on at least 3 days per week) and that this may be having an impact on the health of their brains.

___ Getting kids outside and active could help with brain health: Participaction report (The Globe and Mail): The physical benefits of kids leading an active lifestyle, including better heart heal…

A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a #syntheticbiology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.

Proteins, the end product of genes, carry out life functions. Most human proteins are modified by a process called serine phosphorylation — a chemical switch that can alter their structure and function. Malfunctions in this process have been implicated in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s yet are difficult to detect and study. A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a synthetic biology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.

“We synthesized over 110,000 phosphoproteins from scratch and we can now study how they all function together,” said Jesse Rinehart, associate professor of cellular and molecular physiology at the Systems Biology Institute and senior author of the research. “This is the future of scientific research — we can build everything we study.”

Continue reading “New platform will help create designer human proteins in the lab” »

The first known human case of the virus was identified in a Florida teen after a year of tests. Known symptoms include fever and a severe rash, but it’s unclear if it causes brain inflammation.

I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell, got filled with life again.”

Researchers have created e-dermis, an electronic skin that transmits sensations of pain from an amputee’s prosthetic hand to their brain.

Compared with brain organoids grown from ordinary human cells (top), those with a Neanderthal gene variant (bottom) differ in appearance and behavior.

Herpes Viruses And Alzheimer’s: A Possible Link : Shots — Health News Two herpes viruses that cause skin rashes in toddlers may accelerate Alzheimer’s disease when they infect brain cells. The finding suggests antiviral drugs might help protect the brain.

Would you share your thoughts if we could communicate directly from brain to brain?

This brain implant gives users prosthetic memory that can boost the brain’s short-term recall.

New research shows that the brain‘s neuroplasticity isn’t as flexible as previously thought.

One of the brain’s mysteries is how exactly it reorganizes new #information as you learn new tasks. The standard to date was to test how neurons learned new behavior one #neuron at a time.

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh decided to try a different approach. They looked at the population of neurons to see how they worked together while #learning a new behavior. Studying the intracortical population activity in the primary motor cortex of rhesus macaques during short-term learning in a brain–computer interface (BCI) task, they were able to study the reorganization of population during learning.

Continue reading “The Limits of Neuroplasticity in the Brain” »